


Drawing the Line

by Frangipanidownunder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-08
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-10-29 17:08:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10858383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frangipanidownunder/pseuds/Frangipanidownunder
Summary: Set pre IWTB and written for a photo prompt showing the inside of a bus.





	Drawing the Line

The bus was full of travellers, pinning their hopes on a life a few hundred miles in another direction. Scully sat pondering the fates that took each of these people north. Was there any more hope in another compass direction? Was the needle of her life pointed her in the wrong direction? Was Mulder the wrong compass point? Or the right one?  
Days like these, spent on a dirty bus seat, breathing in the stale air that tasted of despondency and inertia rather than hope now, these were the days she felt she’d made the wrong choices. She had a sliding doors moment every time she bought a ticket.  
As the bus pulled away she cringed the ease with which she lied to her superiors and colleagues, professed her immutable assertion that Fox Mulder had disappeared a long time ago. She was well-trained, of course, but it had been years since she’d been an agent. She should have been rustier, but it all came back too easily, the subterfuge, the cover stories.  
She used to have a conscience. When had she lost it? Sometimes, in the night, she would remember how she used to be. So fresh, so keen, so naïve. So fucking right that it made her flush with embarrassment. When had she lost that certainty?  
Had she lost these parts of her when she was abducted? When he was? When she gave up William? Who was she now? This Dana Scully running away on a bus heading north to see her partner on the lam. How did she go from laughing in the rain to watching it sheet off windows on day-long bus trips?  
At first, Mulder refused to tell her where he was. They decided it was safer that way – for her, for him and for William. He shifted around a lot. But weeks dragged into months and they both yearned for more than just an occasion email. They were just flesh and blood. Their humanity let them down.  
They missed each other.  
She had refused to meet him last time. She couldn’t bear the leaving again. She demanded he come home. Tried to convince him that their enemies had grown bored of the search, that they were old news. That the FBI would simply forget they ever existed. Expunge all records. She wouldn’t beg, though. They may have learned to compromise during their cases, but there was no middle ground to reach here, no concession to make. His next email took weeks to come.  
This latest journey was nearing its end. It was much shorter, just a few hours, but her neck was gristled, her back stiff, her eyes gritty. She wondered how many more she had in her. What was the point if there was never any change, never an end in sight. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life running to him. Wouldn’t. But how to extricate oneself from someone like Mulder?  
Grey snow was banked against the kerb. The sky seemed to press its heaviness down on her as she waited for her bag. The rental agency light was a beacon across the parking lot, a brightness in the gloom. She read the directions one last time and headed out to the dark and winding road.  
Mulder was waiting for her at their designated meeting point. Just another series of co-ordinates on a map of their lives. She imagined the he shape of all the dots on their map would be quite beautiful. She saw in the beam of her headlights that his beard had grown fuller, his body bulkier. He smiled and put his bag in the trunk. There was something comforting in that, the weight of his possessions in a bag in the car, something familial.  
He got in the drivers seat and turned the car round.  
“Heading south, Mulder? Back the way I came?”  
He nodded.  
“Where’s your car?”  
“I left it behind this time.”  
She wasn’t sure when she nodded off but her forehead was pressed against the cold glass of the window when she woke up. Her head throbbed. The sun wasn’t up but a bleak dawn was beginning to break up the clouds on the horizon. The landscape was lightly treed. Mulder looked over at her, reached a hand out to rub her thigh. She shifted up in her seat and cracked her neck.  
“Where are we?”  
“West Virginia.”  
“What?”  
“We’re nearly there.”  
“Nearly back home?”  
He chuckled. “Kind of.”  
The car sat on the gravel driveway and Scully craned round to watch Mulder closing the gates. Drawing a line behind them. Shutting the past out. He got back in without saying a word and drove on.  
The house loomed ahead, unremarkable in the silver of the new day.


End file.
